In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the only option for many couples who want to have their own genetic child. This is an expensive procedure – it can cost up to $20,000 per attempt, with about a 40% success rate overall.

Couples going for IVF are often desperate to have their own child, and the uncertainty of success can be emotionally and financially draining. For this reason they are an especially vulnerable population when it comes to optional services (“add-on services”) that promise to increase the chances of success.

A recent BMJ article reviewed the evidence for 38 IVF add-on services typically offered in the UK: “Lack of evidence for interventions offered in UK fertility centres.” The title gives away the punch line – of the 38 services they reviewed, only one had any compelling published evidence of efficacy, endometrial scratch (causing minor trauma to the uterine wall to enhance the probability of embryo implantation). Even then the evidence was only “moderate.” The authors write:

Our appraisal of the evidence shows only one intervention, endometrial scratching, for which the review evidence robustly supports an increase in live birth rate, yet even this evidence is of only moderate quality, and the observed benefit is only in women with more than two previous embryo transfers.

That could easily be just random noise in the research. If you look at 38 different treatments, what are the odds that at random one of them will have an excess of false positive studies, and only in one subgroup (which is a red flag)?

Functional Medicine practitioners like to make patients think that this diagram actually means something.

I’ve frequently written about a form of medicine often practiced by those who bill themselves as practicing “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (or, as I like to refer to it, “integrating” quackery with medicine). I’m referring to something called “functional medicine” or, sometimes, “functional wellness,” which Wally Sampson first introduced to readers of this blog way back in 2008, and continued to educate our readers over multiple posts. Over the years, I’ve tried to explain why the term “functional medicine” (FM) is really a misnomer, how in reality it is a form of “personalized medicine” gone haywire, or, as I like to refer to it, as “making it up as you go along.” Unfortunately, thanks largely to its greatest popularizer, Dr. Mark Hyman, FM is popular, so much so that Bill and Hillary Clinton count Hyman as one of their medical advisors and the Cleveland Clinic, not satisfied with embracing prescientific traditional Chinese medicine, has gone “all in” for FM by hiring Dr. Hyman two years ago to set up a functional medicine clinic. Unfortunately, it’s been “wildly successful” there.

Unfortunately its success is not deserved, at least from a scientific standpoint.(more…)

It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered Glenn Sabin. You might remember him, though. He runs a consulting firm, FON Therapeutics, which is dedicated to the promotion of “integrative” health, or, as I like to put it, the “integration of pseudoscience and quackery with science-based medicine. What I remember most about Sabin is how he once proclaimed that “integrative medicine” was a brand, not a specialty. Unfortunately, he was correct in his assessment. Basically, he declared, “CAM [complementary and alternative medicine] is dead. The evolution of evidence-based, personalized integrative medicine, and its implementation in clinic, lives on.” The reason CAM was being killed by its advocates was, of course, because the term CAM contains the word “alternative” in it, and that was a barrier to mainstream acceptance. It didn’t bother Sabin one whit that there’s a lot of unscientific and unproven quackery in the CAM that has mostly become integrative medicine:

It’s true that not all stress reduction techniques, say, Reiki, boast a solid evidence base. But many clinicians who offer services like Reiki do so because they’ve observed it helping many of their patients to relax, thus lessening their need for certain medications. They rationalize that since the intervention is not potentially harmful and their patient is more relaxed and reporting beneficial value, then what difference does it really make if we don’t yet know exactly how it works?

To him, “integrative” health and medicine were the future, mainly because the connotation is much more favorable. To paraphrase how I put it at the time, no longer were CAM practitioners content to have their favorite quackery be “complementary” to real medicine. After all, “complementary” implied a subsidiary position. Medicine was the cake, and their nostrums were just the icing, and that wasn’t anywhere good enough. Those promoting CAM craved respect. They wanted to be co-equals with physicians and science- and evidence-based medicine. The term “integrative medicine” served their purpose perfectly. No longer were their treatments merely “complementary” to real medicine. Oh, no. Now they were “integrating” their treatments with those of science- and evidence-based medicine! The implication, the very, very, very intentional implication, was that alternative medicine was co-equal to science- and evidence-based medicine, an equal partner in the “integrating.”(more…)

I’ve had the Monday spot on this blog for quite a long time now. While there are many advantages to posting on Monday, not the least of which is having more time to put a post together (although that is also a disadvantage because it incentivizes my taking more time than I sometimes should), one distinct disadvantage is that all the Monday holidays are mine. That leaves me a choice on, for example, Memorial Day and Labor Day every year. It’s a choice with three options: The first is: Don’t post. (Do stop laughing, please. I know it’s me.) The second is: Use a guest post. I thought about this, and there are guest posts in the pipeline, but I don’t like to use a guest post just because I’m feeling lazy. It strikes me as an abuse of being the managing editor. Finally, I could post, which is what I decided to do.

I do not know what “community wellness” is or how one measures whether wellness has been successfully “encouraged.” In any event, in the NADA protocol, acupuncture needles are inserted bilaterally into the auricle (outer portion) of the ear at a depth of 1-3 mm at five specific points (sympathetic, shen men, lung, liver, and kidney) and left in place for 45 minutes.

And:

Beyond the actual needling treatment, a key element of the protocol specifies qualities of behavior and attitude on the part of the clinician, consistent with what is known as the Spirit of NADA.

NADA claims there is

strong evidence for the effect of the NADA protocol in improving patient outcomes [in addiction treatment] in terms of program retention, reductions in cravings, anxiety, sleep disturbance and need for pharmaceuticals.

I had originally intended a focused discussion of a single topic, but life circumstances have conspired to prevent me from doing so. In the place of my intended post, please enjoy the following collection of hastily assembled pseudomedical odds and ends brought to my attention over the past few weeks. (more…)

The pixels were barely dry on David Gorski’s lament over the expansive integration of pseudoscience into the care of veterans when President Obama signed legislation that will exacerbate this very problem. The “Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016” (“CARA”) contains provisions that will undoubtedly keep Tracy Gaudet, MD, and her merry band of integrative medicine aficionados at the VA busy for the next few years integrating even more quackery into veterans’ medical care.

CARA is intended to address the serious prescription drug abuse problem in the U.S. It provides grants for local communities dealing with drug abuse crises and for drug abuse programs, improves access to overdose reversal medication and medication-assisted treatment for drug addiction, and assists in training first responders, among other things. It also includes provisions related to pain management, such as development of best practices to treat pain. None of that is the problem.

Deep in the Act, almost at the end, is “Subtitle C – Complementary and Integrative Health,” which begins with “Expansion of research and education on and delivery of complementary and integrative health to veterans.” I am not sure who stuck this into the new law, but it is only tangentially related to addiction and recovery. It establishes the “Creating Options for Veterans’ Expedited Recovery” Commission or, in the acronym-rich language of government, “COVER.” (more…)

Sometimes there is a strange confluence of events that dictate what I feel that I need to write about when my turn here at SBM rolls around each Monday. Last week, a reader sent me a rather bizarre acupuncture study, and I thought I might write about that. Then I saw Mark Crislip’s (as usual) excellent deconstruction of the frequent claim by acupuncture apologists that acupuncture “works” by releasing endorphins and thought, “Maybe another topic.” But then, over the weekend, the Friends of Science in Medicine sent me a link to their latest article, a review of acupuncture entitled “Is there any place for acupuncture in 21st century medical practice?” Not surprisingly, the FSM (Friends of Science in Medicine, not the Flying Spaghetti Monster) concludes that the answer is no. However, in stark contrast to that conclusions are studies like the one mentioned above, studies so ridiculous that, when I discuss it, you will hardly believe that anyone thought it was a good idea to utilize the money, time, and precious, precious human subjects to answer such a ridiculous question. After that discussion, I’ll come back to the FSM’s statement and discuss the evidence base (or rather, lack thereof) for acupuncture for pretty much anything.(more…)

Pictured: A great way to get a staph infection, not a great way to get an endorphin rush. Try jogging. Or heroin.*

I was reading, and deconstructing, a particularly awful bit of advice for acupuncture by Consumer Reports. It was the same old same old, but it was the source that made it particularly awful. I expect more from Consumer Reports than the uncritical regurgitation of the standard mythical acupuncture narrative. The report included the quote

One possible reason for the benefits of acupuncture: Studies show that it causes us to release feel-good hormones, called endorphins, that suppress pain.

I have never bothered to go back and see what the original literature was to support endorphins as a potential mechanism for a beneficial effect of acupuncture on pain.

That endorphins are released as a result of a noxious stimulus didn’t surprise me; that is what endorphins are for. And endorphins are unlikely to be the mechanism for all the other diseases for which the WHO suggests acupuncture benefits.

To my surprise, my brief search that day came up with very little information on the endorphins and acupuncture.

What I wanted to know was the evidence behind the universal meme that acupuncture releases feel-good hormones. If Consumer Reports says it is so, it must be true, right? So I plugged ‘acupuncture endorphin’ into PubMed and went to work. (more…)

Only 6 of the 50 state legislatures are in regular session now. Many have ended two-year (2015-2016) consecutive sessions in which legislation from one year carries over into the next. The Texas, Montana, and North Dakota legislatures didn’t meet at all in 2016.

During 2015-2016, over a dozen naturopathic licensing or registration bills and at least 15 naturopathic practice expansion bills were introduced. (In some states, companion bills were introduced in each house. These were counted as one bill.) At least 19 chiropractic practice expansion bills were introduced in the same period. Four acupuncture/TCM practice acts were introduced, as were 14 practice expansion bills. This count does not include bills trying to force public and private insurers to cover CAM practitioner services.